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>I don't use the Google Browser because I don't want all my browsing history and everything else put in their databases. I

The never expiring tracking cookie works on all browsers. Has anyone written a FF add-on that resets this cookie? If not theres always this easy way to do it:

http://www.everythingisnt.com/archives/00002067.htm

This filters out a good chunk of them.

NoScript requires you to explicitly enable sites to run scripts, either per session or permanently. This turns people off, but security is never easy and it's just two clicks.

By creating the ruckus that made /. post this story, you led me to read the comments, which led me to Mike's adblocking hosts file. I'd been thinking about something like that, but didn't care enough to bother before.

You are now officially victims of the Streisand Effect.

In addition to the benefits of not having your window resized, obnoxious or undesired ads, etc. blocking ads helps pages render that much faster because you're not loading the undesirable bits in the first place.

Now some may say ads are small and don't take much bandwidth, the servers are not as fast as my connection may be, and I hate having to wait around for some ads.xxyyuuuxxx.com to get around to sending their data in the first place.

Incidentally, the Firefox security plugin NoScript does wonders for getting rid of Flash ads and the like.

So what's next, banning the use of hosts files?

Mike's ad-blocking hosts file does it for me: http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

Thats why I use this one which is 10th the size and doesnt do any moralizing for you. thehun.net and everything loads fine, except referrer portals that also also adservers like refer.cc.

I have a commercial website. If my ISP would pull such a stunt I'd drag them by their cojones into court for defacing my pages and putting my end users at risk.

Where I live I have to put up a separate page (like in Germany) where I identify my company for being responsible for the content. Adding ads to my web page over which I have no control means that they have asserted control over my pages, and I can no longer exercise my responsibility for content. What if they serve a virus? What if they decide that porn pays better?

Nope - it would be court or police (unauthorised computer use) immediately. No BS, no delay and no mercy.

Having said that, I did notice on one system that I rarely get 404s now. Any unknown domain makes me end up at GoDaddy. Now, I don't have anything against GoDaddy but I prefer a 404 over crap ads, so I wonder where this came from. No matter, I'm about to nuke and rebuild my XP build anyway - I would just like to know where it came from.

BTW, there's also http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html to suppress all the other crap whilst surfing normally. The failure messages are very instructive as you discover just who is handing your details off to advertisers..

If they do feel that they need access to the Internet and are so concerned about porn perhaps they should use a web content filter such as DansGuardian. In addition to doing that, perhaps blocking some advertising related URLs with Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts file might also be helpful. Of course using a software or hardware based firewall and up to date anti-virus software, anti-spyware software, and the latest security patches would also be good. I am not a computer professional or network administrator but those seem like reasonable precautions to me for a school network.

I use Mike's Ad blocking hosts file, although I haven't checked to see if Aquantive is on the list of blocked URLs. I use it on both my Windows computer and my Linux computer. It can also be used with Mac OSX. Whenever Mike's website comes out with an updated version of his Ad Blocking Hosts file I update my computer's hosts file. However, it wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft eventually tries to create some kind of problems for users who dare to try to block any of Aquantive's URLs either through a hosts file or through the firewall in their router. Either that or perhaps Microsoft will just start ignoring parts of the hosts file.

Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts file

I just block ads at source. Ad-free browsing in all three browsers I use, MSIE, Firefox _and_ Opera! :-)

Fair enough point about Firefox extensions, although I'm beginning to like Opera widgets a lot.

change your host file, and say good by to ads: http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

Then you jsut block google's own ad servers, which Ive been doing for years with a simple hosts file. Works for all browsers/applications on my system. Also set your google never-expire tracking cookie to get deleted once per session and you're set.

Then you jsut block google's own ad servers, which Ive been doing for years with a simple hosts file. Works for all browsers/applications on my system. Also set your google never-expire tracking cookie to get deleted once per session and you're set.

No one on Slashdot has had to deal with doubleclick in *years*

In case there are some poor unfortunate souls that have had to deal with doubleclick and others, try this:
http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

It's a Linux and Windows solution. The best and simplest there is.

I use Mike's add blocking hosts files on my three computers that blocks advertising related communication with DoubleClick and other similar advertising related URL's. The modified hosts file takes the attempts to communicate with them and diverts them to the 127.0.0.1 loop back address on my computers. I use one of their modified hosts files on all three of my computers. One of the computers is a Windows 2000, another runs Windows XP and the third runs Ubuntu Linux. The modified hosts file trick works on all three computers and I update the modified hosts file regularly.

Before doing that, I used to go directly to the DoubleClick webpage and choose the opt-out option from the DoubleClick website. That would let them know that I did not wish to be tracked by them and a special cookie would be downloaded that would stop them from tracking me on-line.

As for ad blocking, it's something we're mulling over but it's not natively in IE7. I'm sure there are add-ins you can get for IE that will block ads.

I use EverythingIsn't hosts file to block ads, plus AdBlock in Firefox.

I watched the 20/20 segment about Matt on ABC. If I heard correctly, I believe they said that the family computer was using Windows 98. I don't really know how well Windows 98 can or can't be secured, but it was not Windows XP with Service Pack II. Does Microsoft still provide security patches for Windows 98? If so were they applied?

A family that is still using Windows 98 does not sound like they are serious computer users. These are probably clueless computers users who don't know the first thing about computer security. I couldn't help but instantly picture this computer that was probably full of spyware and perhaps even a root kit, open ports, unpatched security flaws and who knows what else.

The 20/20 segment also mentioned that Matt agreed to take a lie detector test and passed the test. Even after he passed the polygraph exam the prosecutor continued to press charges.

Their lawyer eventually had computer expert Tammi Loehrs look at the hard drive. On the ABC website, it says that she found "... more than 200 infected files, so-called backdoors that allowed hackers to access the family computer from remote locations ... ." On the show someone suggested that someone may have preferred to stash those files on the Bandy family computer instead of storing it on his own.

By the way, according to a recent New York Times article, an estimated 11 percent of all computers are zombie computers that are part botnets spewing out spam. So law enforcement and prosecutors should start with always asking who else might be controlling the computer.

I mostly use my Linux box at home and do my best to try to keep it sure. I download the latest security updates regularly, I keep all TCP/IP ports closed and fully stealth. We also have a Windows XP SP II laptop that connects to the wireless router with 802.11g, but we do use WPA encryption with a very long non-random password. Both computers use the latest version of Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts file to block advertising URLs. Some people think I am too paranoid, but after seeing the 20/20 segment on ABC, I can't help thinking, "I hope I haven't missed anything."

If someone ever wants to frame or discredit someone, now we know, all they need to do is send a few child porn photos to that person's less than perfectly secured computer and then somehow tip off law enforcement.

http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file

Use the HOSTS file over at everythingisnt.com for instant blocking of hundreds of advertising. Been using it for years, and have laughed heartily at the cries of people complaining that their pop-up blockers don't work. Who uses/needs a popup blocker when you can manage the advertising correctly?

>What _are_ these "ads" people are talking about?

Edit your hosts file. The "ads" are the empty boxes you used to see blinky annoying things in.

This popular extension checkbox idea sounds pretty good. I will say, there are several filtering options besides Adblock. I've been pleased with a decent hosts file http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html and Flashblock. In the past, have enjoyed Proxomitron. There are probably good Greasemonkey scripts, etc.

>>> In order to keep everyone happy, I'd suggest an option in the installer which provides you with 5 or so top extensions (already pre-ticked, with an option to deselect all) and if you continue with them enabled then firefox will automatically download and install them for you.

..what format the ads will be in. Java? Flash?

We'll have to see if Mike's ad-blocking hosts file will strip them.

Here's a listing of Universal's lables and a partial list of their artists.

Too bad the jazz artists suck, with the exception of Herbie Hancock.

Both links pop in new browsers.

which I use at home is an old computer (was a 166MHZ CPU/32MB RAM, but is now a 300MHZ CPU/64MB RAM). A linux distro called IP COP which is based on a similar distro called smoothwall.

It turns your old computer into a dedicated firewall/router that operates under broadband, dialup and apparently now has wireless support. And if you add Mike's Hosts File to it then you have a a fairly easy setup for safer web surfing.

Combined wih using Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird on the computers that connect through my IP COP distro. I've had very little issues with spyware, pop-up adverts and other misc headaches.

See Mike's ad-blocking hosts file.

Opens in a new window.

I've been using this for years. It's only down-fall is the inability to block some ads (java? flash? I don't know) but it works damned well otherwise. Hell, I don't even see the ads here.

Unless they move away from using a hosts file (is that even possible?) this should fix most of that.

If an ad is hosted on a known ad-serving commercial, mapping ad servers to 127.0.0.1 can help defeat attacks like this. On my Linux and OS X machines I have a cron script automatically curl http://everythingisnt.com/hosts to my /etc/hosts file (after first archiving it) every so often, appending past entries I want to preserve and overwriting the previous list entries. The site has a Windows installer too, so I manually install on my Windows machines whenever an update comes out. I use this list on all my machines and it is pretty effective. My motivation isn't defense so much as it is not wanting to see advertisements at all or waste time loading them.

Block Ads: Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts File
I use it, I love it.

I use a similar ad blocking hosts file on both my Linux computer and on the Windows XP computer. I have been using "Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts file" for several years now on both computers. Like the modified hosts file you mentioned, Mike's modified hosts file also diverts the URLs for most ad servers to the 127.0.0.1 loop-back address that all computers have. His webpage has instructions for using his modified hosts file in either Windows, MAC, Linux and Unix. He regularly comes out with updated versions of his hosts file.

You also mention using a more secure operating system, I use Linux instead of Windows most of the time at home. Of course I don't use Internet Explorer on the Linux computer since it isn't even avilable for Linux and would not want to anyway. I use the Linux version of Firefox instead. Spyware, viruses and worms are almost unheard of under non-Microsoft operating systems such as Linux or Mac OS X.

As a Linux user, it is really nice not having to worry about spyware or even worms or viruses. I am not really an expert or sure exactly why only Windows users have those problems. Perhaps Linux and Mac users do not have enough market share to be worth targeting. As far as the lack viruses and worms for Linux and Mac OS X, there might be other reasons such as IE's support for Active X and the fact that most Windows users at home don't use a separate administrative account.

I wonder if perhaps the genetic diversity of the software on most Linux computers might also make it somewhat harder to write spyware (and also viruses) that work properly on all computers. Linux users use a variety of different email programs, browsers, kernels and versions of Linux. By comparison Windows is an in-bred monoculture with most users using outlook and IE and the same identical kernel.

Perhaps they just feel we aren't worth bothering with. I suppose that someone could theoretically write Linux spyware, then make it available to be downloaded in DEB, RPM, TGZ, and also source code formats. Then they could try to persuade me to download and install their spyware in whichever package format is appropriate for the version of Linux that I use. Next, I would probably be asked for my root password so their spyware could be properly installed with the necessary privileges. Yes, I suppose that could happen.

But anyway, I also use a modified hosts file to divert most known advertising related URL's to the 127.0.0.1 loop-back address on my computer. I use Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts file which can be used with either Windows, Linux, Unix or Mac OSX. Many web pages have some background communication going to those advertising related URL's, much of which can be blocked by a modified hosts file. I hope that it includes the latest URL's for Direct Revenue and most similar spyware companies. I'm not sure, but I update the hosts file regularly anyway.

One last defensive trick that I use is, on the Thunderbird email program, I chose the option to not automatically display remote images unless they come from someone that is in my address book. Allowing those images to be displayed would require the images to be download from some remote IP address and (I suppose) that might also allow them to detect my IP address and be able to tell that I received their spam. Most email programs (even Outlook) has similar options.

The article could have at least mentioned the "we" don't all have a problem with spyware

fastclick.net doubleclick atdmt.com burstnet valueclick mediaplex casalemedia tribalfusion advertising.com

The reason these stories on Slashdot are useless is because all of the slashbots here will be screaming "I don't want ads!". Well, tough shit. Advertising is part of our world and culture and they are coming to video games whether you want them to or not.

There are 3 ways to avoid advertising. Here they are:

1) Die. Seriously. Then your problems with advertising will be all over for good. The drawback is that it is permanent [depending on your beliefs in an afterlife.... :) ].

2) Live 'off the grid' on public/private land with NONE of the technological amenities of modern civilization other than (maybe) a P.O. box or other suitable 'mail drop' (but then the ad men will probably get ahold of it and still send you junk mail! :P). I like how the USPS's definiton of '1st Class Mail' only covers bills/invoices/purchase orders/related whatnot, financial statements/legal papers/government correspondence, checks and equivalents, and handwritten personal correspondence. To them, everything else that is not a periodical or parcel of some kind is considered bulk mail and is fair game for recycling/disposal. :)

3) Use the technologies at hand to minimize/eliminate your exposure to advertising. Some examples:

3a) Digital Video Recorders with 'adskip' (if you can still buy 'em or build 'em). If push comes to shove, hang on to your VCRs and use them instead.

3b) DVD Players that ignore Prohibited User Operation(s) (and region codeds as well!). Yay, no more FBI warnings/trailers/long animated menus before the movie! :) (the animated menu on Disney's Lion King DVD is notoriously long! :P) If you live in the USA and are thinking 'FVCK THE DMCA(.pdf)!!!!' there is software out there that will allow you to 'remaster' a commercial DVD to remove 'all' unwanted content. Non-USA world citizens don't have this worry (lucky them!)

3c) Ad blocking hosts file for your webbrowser such as this one. Use a 'surfer friendly' web browser like Off By One that ignores Flash and popup windows because it doesn't understand the SCRIPT and OBJECT HTML tags I am using it now to write this post instead of IE 5 that came with Windows 2000. Slashdot looks like crap in IE 5 so I gave up on it and am now using Off By One to surf Slashdot--much nicer! If you have to/want to use a 3rd party popup blocker, I heartily recommend NoAds

On Windows and tired of email spam? Filter it out with my absolutely free gift back to the Internet community at large who can use it. Since I started using it, my email spam has dropped to essentially zero. Attention Mods. before you mod this post down as spam/karmawhoring, consider 'going after' Roland Piquepaille first who always seems to get a story posted here no matter how trivial it is sometimes...or the multpage 'adfest' stories mentioned here from Tom's Hardware.

P.S. Sorry, I have no solution to public restroom advertising other than to keep your eyes closed while you do your business, use a 100% ad-free bathroom, or risk being arrested for defecating/urinating in public....

"The writing is on the wall" Indeed. Legal, for-profit commercial graffiti.... :P

Does your music refuse to play?

Re:The saddest thing about a MLP RPG...(Score:2)
by gad_zuki! (70830) on Saturday April 01, @06:33PM (#15043402)
(http://everythingisnt.com/)
>The BS online "RPG" that 2 of my granddaughters and ALL THEIR FREINDS play isn't too far from a MLP universe..

Okay, I give up. What BS RPG are you talking about?

Runescape. All the Java spyware you can eat,

I've found this ad blocker to be exceptionally good: http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html. Just install and you're good in any browser.

> We know when you sleep; when you awaken. (Usage analysis.)

How to configure Firefox to discard google's tracking cookie here.

Now Slashdot published this article, It seens my article was rejected, so Im posting it here:

It's on the news and in other news.com, spotlighted by Google's refusal on providing search query history, that search engines may
have been collecting more than reasonable information about you, and without your permission (BTW I call my disabled cookie a explicit denial).

So I'd like to know from you, paranoic fellow: How do you protect yourself from search engines?

Besides not allowing cookies, I don't use search engines that use redirect and I block addresses already know to collect personal information as a business. But now I think it's time to step further, par to their insistence on collecting, or trying to figure, information that I explicit denied.

FYI I don't like proxies, first because a lot of them are maintened by people that instead are logging your connection, secondly because it's necessary just one bad guy using a public proxy to justice provide a warrant to log all the communication on that proxy, either from bad or good guys. And, it's not just my IP, it's also the other information that Google, for example, says to associate: date, search query, browser/OS, lang and cookies. I really want to confuse those bastards. If those SEOs morons can be sucessuful don't letting me find useful results on $valuable$ queries why we can't be in enforcing our privacy?

Since most of that information in provided by the browser I would seek for a Firefox Extension or a local hosted frontend. For further elaboration: every search would be followed by a flood of fake requests (different sources IPs) but with a fixed pattern (the query you want and a faked Browser/OS), if the information is likely to be false it has no value; every different query would be sent to a different server, Google for example have hundreds of servers world wide, bypass their nameserver and use a different server on every search, one pattern less and the problem to sync your searches on their side; improve bookmark/history search, to avoid searching again what you already did; other suggestions? And more important: the solutions?

1. Run Windows as a normal user, not as an administrator.
2. Use Mike's ad-blocking hosts file.

Try viewing the printer-friendly page while using a hosts file.

Here are some end user solutions for these issues:
Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts File
A handy hack that works very well at blocking ads, so long as they aren't hosted on the site itself.
Flashblock
A Firefox extension for blocking the flash based ads. Easy to access the flash on a item by item basis for stuff you do want to get to.
Bug Me Not
For circumventing registration.

Still not ideal, but I find they help quite a bit. RSS may be the answer long term though because of the flexibility it gives you format-wise. Now if news sites would just implement RSS 2.0 or Atom...

Oh, I wondered what the big empty blocks in the middle of the text were. I have ad blocking with this http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

Block ads. Works for me.

>it should be the number of errors per article.

It also should be weighed on the severity of the error. I mean, you won't hear that Steve Ditko is a "chaos magician" in Britnannica or that random newspaper editors had a role in both Kennedy assisinations. I'd also would like to see a study on bias. The wikipedia people work hard to get a clean POV, but you have the problem of motivation. The people most motivated to edit GWB's bio page (or any semi-controversial figure) are either going to be loud-mouth supporters or loud-mouth detractors. Sometimes when I browse the wikipedia I find some serious bias, edit it, and find that the motivated biased person just goes back and re-edits it. That's a great demotivator. People who put in time to make it work just get editied out by the nuts with too much free time on their hands.

Even Wales says there's going to be changes to stop such free and open-editing. Hopefully, these problems are just growing pains for one of the coolest projects on the web.

I've noticed the same thing on my machine at work. Just terrible pop-ups, even with firefox, some of which mimick MS's security center or are just more 'punch the monkey' ads. I've seen flash embedded spam with voice-overs, which are unintentionaly hilarious with this dead-pan 1950's voice.

Screw the return of the bad old days, I block using a host file so no matter what browser, mailer, etc I'm using, a lot of this stuff doesn't get through. Funny, I still spend an incredible amount of money on purchases and actaully might do some research before buying a large ticket item. I dont feel a flashy ad or an expensive TV campaign has anything to say other than "Look at how we're pissing away our money!"

well I run sarge :) but if we are speaking about ads, I'm using custom hosts file that is pointing to my local install of apache2. So every request for an ad shows 404 ErrorDocument from apache2. I don't like to see "Not found" all the time, so I placed in 404 a reference to this. It says that only 142 days are left for our second child to be born. :) Hosts file from my wife's computer is also pointing to it, and she was delighted when she saw it.

Try Mike's Ad blocking hosts file.

It gets rid of 75% of remote hosted ads out of the box, and almost everything with a little tweaking:

http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

I've been using it for years. Works great!

If it misses anything, you can always add your own info to it to suit your needs.

I have 4 computers at home (2 windows, 2 linux), the one I use as my internet sharing server is a little p166 (32mb ram) chugging happily away with a linux distro http://www.ipcop.org/ with a little bit of help in filling my /etc/hosts file in sites to block Mike Skallas' Ad blocking hosts file as well as my own little shortlist of unwanted websites.

having a seperate computer as a firewall helps prevent a lot of spyware crap from raping my net connection with unneccesary data and prevent infection from easy exploits.

Combined with the fact I use firefox http://www.mozilla.org/ I get a pretty good ad-reduced experience. And if I want to kill a lot of adverts off when going for a browse onto possibly dodgy websites (be it crappy homepages, dodgy services, and porn [for those of you who still don't have girlfriends!]) depending on what I'm doing I'll kill client side scripting (Java/Javascript) to take things one step further.

As well as running "Spybot" occasionally and doing the odd "free" virus scan from a couple of antivirus websites. my net experience has been reclaimed to an acceptable level on a low budget.

If I'm feeling really paranoid I'll boot up my normal windows machine with knoppix instead of windows so I can go carefree onto any website without fucking it up with windows-targeted spyware

Oh yeah, my homepage is colinnashonline.com for those who are bored

I use an altered hosts file to block some of the advertising related communication that goes on in the background when visiting many ordinary webpages. Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts File diverts known advertising related URLs to the 126.0.0.1 loopback address. I block the advertising related communication partially for privacy reasons but also because it make many of the webpages load more quickly on my 26.4K dial-up internet connection. The modified hosts keeps about 1/3 of the advertisements from appearing in most wepages. The missing advertisemnts appear as empty rectangles. The webpages download more quickly when not downloading the graphics intense advertisements. Broadband and DSL are not available are not yet available where I live and the local telephone lines are only good for 26.4K (even with a 56K modem). I use the modified hosts files on both my Windows computer and my Linux computer.

I also chose the option in my email prgram set to not automatically display the graphics in my email messages. Many of the graphics in the messages are downloaded from links to an IP address. So if I understand correctly, when someone views a piece of spam it is conceivably possible for the spammer to tell when the message has been received by the grapics being downloaded. He would then know that he had used a valid email address and should keep sending you more spam. I the the Linux version of the Thunderbird email program and it has the option of not displaying the graphics on some or all of my email. Most email programs for Windows or Linux have that option. I haven't heard if Outlook has that option or not.

I am not sure how up to ate this info is but, have you heard of webbugs? A Web bug is a graphic on a Web page or in an e-mail message designed to monitor who is reading the page or message. Have you heard of Bugnosis the webbug detector for Windows? I do not use Windows very much anymore so I haven't tried using the program in recent years so don't know much about Bugnosis (or webbugs).

If you go the the websites for DoubleClick or some of the other similar companines that monitor us you will also find that you can choose to have an opt-out cookie downloaded to your browser which stops them from moitoring you.

On my computers I block ads with a hosts file. I use http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html/ and update it every few months.

I block ads for 3 reasons
1. I dislike clutter and junk. I visit a webpage for the content. Not the crap floating around trying to sell me something.
2. Spyware relief. This was a bigger issue when I was using IE, but I noticed all my spyware was coming from these banner ads. They either tried to install some ActiveX or exploited some hole to install it without asking. for example on my Father's compter. Every month he would have 30 new spyware apps installed. Once I install this hosts file, I see one or none installed.
3. I rarly is never buy anything because of an ad. If I want something I will go out and get it. I guess ads are only good for one thing... telling me of something that I never new existed. That might be fine for some closed off old grandma but I am pretty much in the know.

I also dislike Spam for obvious reasons, but hate junk mail and phone calls. I either throw junk mail on the floor in the post office or save it and return it in the pre paid envelopes. Since the post office got paid to give me the junk I figure they can pay someone to throw it in the trash. On TV I have TiVo so I can skip threw the commercials in a few seconds. No TiVo in the bedroom and we scream becasue our eyes bleed from the crappy commercials. I also do not answer my door. Anyone who knows me knows to call first. Evry time I opened the door when it was not expected it was someone selling or pushing something. They get the door slammed in their face.

Why? Because they are annoying as hell!

How? hosts file: Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts file

Use a ramdrive. Nothing to do. They delete themselves. Or blackhole them in the first place. See http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html